Google Guides Users On Link Building and Video Best Practices

I find it is always worth keeping an eye on the thousands of SEO related blogs that are available (yes, I get paid to read SEO blogs, pretty cool eh?), but it’s not just the usual suspects from the SEO industries that are worth keeping a beady eye on, you can find SEO tips and hints on search engine blogs as well.

A glance at the recent posts on the Google Webmaster Central Blog makes for some interesting reading. The most recent post is a guide by Kaspar Szymanski about good ways to build quality links to your site. As we all know, there are many ways in which you can attract links to your site, but in this case all techniques are not equal. For example, ‘spamming’ links in comments on unrelated blog posts is not a great way of building your sites strength, page rank, profile or respectability.

In this social networking obsessed world one technique to build links is to actually let other people do it for you. The hallowed mantra of ‘unique compelling content’ may be aired at almost every juncture these days, but its relevance to how the web operates is as strong as ever. If you can offer something that people want (or even better – something people want to tell others about) then you are half way there. For example, if you are a DIY business, why not create some short films of techniques to get the best out of the products you sell? A local garage could offer some quick tips for general car maintenance or checks that people can carry out to ensure that their car is running well. This content does not result in the sort of flash-in-the-pan and transitory traffic generated by a ‘funny’ video, but actually lends value and shows the authority of your site and your business.
Link building doesn’t have to be an entirely off-site process, it helps if you give people something to link to!

Kaspar Szymanski’s full post is on the Webmaster Central Blog and is well worth a read.

Video Content Best Practices

The other post on the Webmaster Central Blog that I want to highlight, is a little more practical in nature as is offers some ‘best practices’ to help Google crawl and index video:

• The first point is a bit of an obvious one but it’s worth checking – Make sure the actual URLs are crawlable. It can be easy to mistakenly add the page, content, video player or thumbnail to the robots.txt file.
• The second point relates to whether the video can be played in all countries. There is an optional “restriction” setting that allows the video to be tagged as only viewable in some countries (or you can set the countries it is restricted from). Google has guidelines in Webmaster Tools Help.
• If the video has been removed then clearly point this out via a (helpful) 404 page or by setting expiration dates set in the Video Sitemap.

Full details are available on the Webmaster Central Blog.

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• Google AdWords Wants Your Products! - December 3, 2010
• Know How Mobile Internet Affects Your Website? Google Analytics does… - December 2, 2010

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